Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

As an amateur beekeeper, the answer is a definate no. Bees put the effort into making honey for a reason, the reason is long term storage. Not only is the concentration of sugar in pure undiluted honey high enough to kill any micro-organism, bees also add peroxide, enzymes and antibodies to honey to preserve it. Because of this, honey makes a fair wound dressing, and samples of uncontamininated, edible honey have been recovered from egyptian pyramids, over 3000 years old. It is only when it is diluted that it can be colonized by organisms. At the same sugar concentration, mead(honey wine) ferments much slower than fruit wines because of the antibiotic additions the bees made. I know honeywater is popular for mycelia culture here because it is simple, but I think that malt/dextrose or potato water are probably better choices.

Dr D

[This message has been edited by Doktor Dung (edited April 06, 2000).]

I bet you could get it to work, though two things pop into my head. . .
Honey only maintains it's contam-resistance when at high molarity. That is to say if you dilute honey in water [or enough in an agar mix] it will contaminate. Maybe there's a happy medium where you get the best of both worlds, I don't know. As long as you're going through the trouble to make your own petris, though, I think it's very advisable to include a more complex carbon source. BRF water is a likely candidate, ala 'potato water'. Cultures from this should theoretically show quicker take-off when put to BRF cakes.

It's certainly possible to create viable honey-plates, I just suspect there are better, more complex ammendments readily available.

**Just noticed you were talking about PURE honey plates. . .That certainly would simplify the culturing process, wouldn't it. Pressure cooker-free. I'd be very interested in seeing some pics if this works. Other molds would still be a concern, I'd imagine. . .as would the osmolarity and carbon source---who knows, fungi always tend to surprise.